Tag: snarky comment

WordPress just told me that I missed our anniversary. That means I’m even disappointing software now.

The 15th of January marked a year since I started writing this bullshit, and tradition dictates that I should have gone out and, in a fit of irony that would even trouble the descriptive powers of Alanis Morissette, bought some paper for my blog service.

Remember paper? Crikey, it all seems so long ago.

So in an effort to make WordPress forgive me, tonight I took my blog out for the evening instead. First I took it my ripped-off copy of Wurd to see how many words I’ve typed; and then off to a word-cloud generator to see what it’s been about. I now know that my blog is twice as long as the novel The Life ofPi, and that I’ve spent an unfeasibly long time talking about cancer, sex and Simon Cowell.

(I also know that I’m likely to get arrested by Microsoft for having a ripped off copy of Word, but I spelled it Wurd, which is bound to baffle even the greatest lawyer. And in my defence, practically everyone else on the planet has a ripped off copy of Word too).

As a result of my research into my own blog, I’ve come up with some findings, and have decided to adapt The Naked Mole Rat into a $100 million 3D Bollywood epic, in which I’m stuck in a boat with a CGI version of Simon Cowell and have to decide whether to have kinky sex with him, or give him an aggressive and painful cancer.

It’s a real conundrum.

Actually, it’s not much of a conundrum. Simon’s getting no sweet, sexy lurve from me, which leaves him with the choice of death or death. A nation grieves. But the reason he’s not getting sweet, sexy lurve from me is because at least one of us (OK, let’s face it, it’s exactly one of us) is a raging heterosexual. And because all my romance is being directed to the lady in my life, who repays it by manipulating my head, as can be seen in this graphic depiction of our relationship.

She’s so manipulative.

I rarely speak about my private life in detail, but for once I’m going to spill my beans and tell you that our relationship is about to go to new places. Specifically, Scotland.

I’m very fond of Scotland, and of all the people from there who I’ve met. I can’t say it’s been a representative sample, or that they’ve liked me very much. But I liked them.

It’s unrepresentative because I tend to meet Stots when, in exchange for a stuffed sheep’s stomach and a night in their bothy, I give them with enough money to buy a small island up there (approximately £78). And that kind of transaction always brings out the best in people.

And it’s hard to say if they liked me because it’s often hard to understand a bloody word they’re saying.

But I still like them. I like their attitude. On a drive up in the highlands once, I stopped at one of the tiny all-purpose stores you often find in deeply remote areas. It was a post office, off license, petrol station, butcher, fishing supplies depot, lumber-merchant and record shop. (Not a greengrocer. It is Scotland after all, and if you want to eat greens they’ll contemptibly direct you to a tuft of thistle by the roadside). The shop had the obligatory wall dedicated to tartan and shortbread, and an entirely startling wall dedicated to Native American Dreamcatchers, which seemed unusual until you realise how many Americans visit Scotland, and how gullible they are.

The shop was miles from the nearest plumbing, and the only member of staff was a short, incomprehensible object of indeterminate sex, radioactively ginger, and with webbed fingers and an advanced case of athlete’s head. So I didn’t hold out much hope when I asked to use the bathroom. It was in a lean-to against the side of the shop, and I expected a wet hole in the floor, at best. But in fact it was a fully fitted bathroom and shower, with soaps and shampoos and fresh towels laid out for anybody who needed them, and, wonderfully, a small pile of socks beneath a sign saying “help yourself”.

The climate up there puts pressures on anyone daring enough to be caught outdoors, and a shower and warm, dry socks can turn a walker’s life around. I’m taking the piss out of Scots because I take the piss out of everybody: but the shower, towels and socks were provided with generosity, and I honestly have no expectation of anything less from people in the top half of the British Isles.

I hate to say it but that open, welcoming, selfless approach to life becomes more common the further north from Westminster you get. Actually, I didn’t hate to say it at all: I like it. I like the fact that true human nature emerges if you simply leave people alone to be people, rather than forcing them to be greedy brutes in a greedy, brutal capital city. Whereas in the wilds of Scotland they have a different attitude: if you don’t hang together you’ll probably hang separately. So be nice.

I’ve expressed this opinion to people in the South of England, and been told that I’m a mad socialist fuckwit who is living in the 70s, and that the Scots are all violent thugs and a drain on the poverty-stricken folks of Surrey. And I’ve reported those conversations to people in bars in Scotland, and been told that the Scots don’t actually hate the English: they just hate the southern English.

Not that I’m any more romantic about Scots than I am about my anniversary with WordPress or my forthcoming week up there with my girlfriend. We’re going to be there on Valentine’s Day, but that’s just an embarrassing scheduling error. We’d both forgotten Saint Valentine existed (because he didn’t – even the Pope who canonised him recognised that “nothing is known about his life”).

Anyway, this 14th Feb there will be no violins or flowers, and I’m not just saying that cos she’ll read this blog, and I want to lay a false trail. The best she can hope for is that I won’t tie the ropes too tight, and will clean the ball-gag before it’s applied. And the best I can hope for is that she’ll apply plenty of lube before she does that thing to me with the object that’s slightly bigger than it looked on LoveHoney.

Other than that, it’ll be the usual mixture of visceral abuse about my hairy back, six-hour fights about how the duvet is shared out, and vain attempts to make her murder look like a tragic accident. I’ll be as cheeky as a 6-foot six-year-old can be, and she’ll respond with a torrent of abuse and profanity, and many, many slaps about the head and neck. I just hope I can persuade her to save her filthy mouth and spanking until we get indoors and naked, where her vocabulary is rich, varied, and remarkably inventive. I flatter myself that I have a wide lexicon and a seedy mind, but she still manages to startle me rigid. It’s a rigidity which comes in handy, when it works.

Damn being old!

I’m not old old, not like the mad racist who lives upstairs and must be avoided at all costs. We popped round to ask if he needed anything from the shops during the recent snow, but after 3 hours all we’d learned was that black people are ruining this country. I’m not there yet, and you have my permission to throw me down a well if I do. But I’ve reached the point at which my body starts to disintegrate, and indeed I got a head-start with the cancer that kicked off this blog a year ago. I’m grateful to the doctors, but have decided to never see one again after accidentally catching an episode of House.

No wonder he’s grumpy: he’s wrong almost all the time.

This week, a man went to see House with hiccups, and after getting his diagnosis wrong five times the so-called “best diagnostician in America” finally worked out that the man’s marriage was doomed, along with his liver. He did this in much the same way as the people in CSI solve crimes, and the people in Church work out how the universe was created: random guesswork and a lot of mumbo-jumbo. This week’s patient thought he had hiccups, but apparently he had something which, from memory, had 3000 syllibals and ended in “itis”, and which every actor on set looked proud to have memorised.

I don’t know why anyone goes to see House anyway. He diagnoses patients without even seeing them, is wrong 9 times out of 10, and it’s pretty much always cancer. So House’s oncologist mate could solve the problem anyway, if he wasn’t too busy being slightly cross-eyed and wetter than a turbot’s handbag. And when the guest-star disease isn’t cancer, it’s something you’ve never heard of; so it’s a bit like reaching the end of The Usual Suspects and being told the villain is a Mr Ted Cunterblast, a total stranger who wasn’t mentioned during the previous 2 hours.

Ted Cunterblast is mentioned by Hugh Laurie though, in his previous career as a purveyor of amusing japes and elaborate swearing with Stephen Fry. (If you’ve never seen their terrific sketch show, imagine Armstrong and Miller, but with Armstrong and Miller being replaced by somebody who can be arsed doing a different sketch every week).

My girlfriend could learn a lot from Fry and Laurie, and I fully expect her to call me Ted Cunterblast upon our next meeting. Although part of me hopes she saves her filthy mouth until we’re on our own in a bothy in Scotland, so there isn’t a repeat of that time she loudly called me a twat in the children’s section of Ikea. I don’t think the Scots are ready for her vocabulary.

Of course, it’s perfectly possible the Scots have learned how to swear by now. I seem to remember Frankie Boyle using a bad word once, and Billy Connolly too. Not as bad as the word I used about him today, when I read this article in the Guardian, in which he was given a free £5,000 holiday and then proceeded to bitch and moan about the whole thing. Well don’t fucking go then! Give the money to some poor kids from Glasgow.

The acquisition of large amounts of money seems to turn even the best person into an utter bastard. Take Sean Connery, a man who bestrides Scotland like a colossus… from his home in tax haven of The Bahamas, where he pays not a penny in tax to support the nation for whose independence he vigorously campaigns. Why do so many nationalists have such a strong objection to spending any money at all on the country they claim to love? The Tories are the same, wrapping themselves in the Union Flag and bellowing at Johnny Foreigner for having the temerity to introduce laws to protect British jobs. But ask that noble, blue-rinsed defender of the UK to pay a single penny more tax to fund his own country, and he’ll let his wife out of the kitchen long enough to fetch his shotgun and let the dogs out on you.

I do find it galling to have the Tories “protecting” Scotland from independence at the same time they insist on “protecting” Scotland from the support of Europe. The EU seems to have funded 90% of the bridges north of the border, and if I were a Scot I’d kick England out, get married to Europe, and stay happy. If they do, I’m going to campaign for Manchester to be officially recognised as a district of Dundee, cos I don’t want to be trapped here with David Cameron.

So there you have it: my 91st blog, and the end of my first year as a blogger. Next year it’s the cotton anniversary and I’m going to get WordPress some knickers, but the year after that it’s the leather anniversary. Stick with me, cos then the filthy sex will really start to get interesting!

Yes, messy. It’s not a typo. It’s the same with orgies: the invitations should read “the more the messier“, not merrier. Messy is so much more fun. After all, who wants a clean orgy, or a clean Christmas? We may long for a white Christmas, but not a clean one – and we only want a white one so we can piss in the snow. I imagine some orgies end the same way.

I like my Christmas like I like my sex: we don’t have to get up too early in the morning, but as soon as we do let’s get on with the action: tear off the wrapping fast, get as messy as possible, laugh, shout, play with all the toys, and make sure the neighbours have reason to complain.

I probably won’t get that type of Christmas this year, because I’m suffering from Empty Nest Syndrome – and I don’t even have kids! I was hoping to spend Christmas drunkenly practicing the baby-making procedure in every room in my flat. Not too drunkenly, obviously. There’s a perfect amount of alcohol for sex: it should make you able to ignore the carpet burns for long enough to get the job done, but should not make Mr Happy become Mr Floppy. And it should definitely not make anybody accidentally sick into my mouth because they went on top.

That’s the amount of alcohol I had planned to consume – just the right amount to make everyone involved forget how they got those bruises the next day, but not enough to require a trip to hospital. And the moment I reached that perfect level of blood-alcohol, I was going to rip off my girlfriend’s knickers (because they’re really cutting into my hips) and make the beast with two backs.

Or at least the beast with one back and a front that’s bent over the kitchen table with a wooden spoon gritted between her teeth.

But it’s not going to happen because of somebody else’s empty nest syndrome, namely my wobbly old widow of a mother, who has inveigled her way into my flat for three days this Christmas, turning it from a sex den into a …. den. And I’m 42. What do I want with a den?

Actually, I very nearly made a den in the living room last week. The lady in my life has recently been pretty lifeless, and rather unladylike too. She’s had a cold, leading to a small tsunami of snot, a great deal of frustrated swearing, and some justifiable moping. And that’s just from me, cos I’ve had the horn and she’s been very much Out Of Bounds. The only way to make her feel her usual perky self has been to build a den out of the box my drums came in, or to put on a Harry Potter movie.

I did think about making a den, but the result would have been sitting in a small, warm box in my living room next to a plague carrier, waiting for her nose to explode all over me and make me sick during Christmas. So she can fuck off with her den: we’re watching Harry Potter.

I quite like Harry Potter. I’m far too old for it, but it served the same formative function in her adolescence that The Lord of the Rings and masturbation served in mine. You never get over that stuff, and to this day a quick wank over the mental image of Arwen and Galadriel lezzing up is enough to make me feel like a contented 12-year-old again. So although Harry Potter will never mean as much to me as it does to my girlfriend, I’m perfectly OK watching the last 6 movies. The first two… not so much. It says much that they’re amongst the worse things John Cleese has been in recently, and he was in the Liberal Democrats.

I even went with my girlfriend to the Harry Potter Studio Tour, which was jolly good fun and rather exciting for a movie buff like me. I wandered around it, amazed by two things:

The level of craftsmanship and imagination involved in making a movie like that (I’d argue the design imagination is at least the equal of JK herself)

Rupert Grint

The mere fact of Grint still amazes me. If he wasn’t famous and I told you I knew a ginger boy called Rupert Grint, you’d say “oh, the poor sod”. It’s like me telling you that the manager of my local MFI store was called Finlay Gentleman (he is – I saw it on a receipt once). You’d wince and laugh, and then wonder why his parents hated him so much. Grint’s name alone is enough to make him extraordinary and dismal. He’s the only person in the movies who has a real name more outlandish than his character.

But beyond his name there’s his face, and his hair, and his voice, and his… there’s no other word for it than this… his talent. You can determine the level of Grint’s talent by measuring it against what his two child-star friends have achieved.

Daniel Radcliffe has appeared naked in a challenging play on the London stage. He’s been rather good in a rather successful horror movie. He made a pretty good fist of being on QI, and has sung a complicated Tom Lehrer song about chemicals on live television. And he achieved all of this in spite of looking like a man who is learning facial expressions from a book. Have you seen him smile? I imagine that’s what Gordon Brown looked like before somebody released the bulldog clip that kept his face tight.

Gordon Brown, aged 19

Daniel Radcliffe, aged 106

Emma Watson went to a top American university where she managed to avoid being killed by an American for 3 years, something few people can do. She then returned to the screen in a moderately good adaptation of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, in which she attempted a bold strategy for of shaking off her reputation for being every online pervert’s favourite teenager: she took off her sexy clothes off in a sexy dance while looking sexily at a sexy boy. And all of this despite being cursed with the vocal quality of a distressed and menstrual cookery teacher in the 1950s, and wild and irrational eyebrows that look like they’re attempting to escape her face and run amok across the moors of England.

Milky Grint. Bad at snorting coke, or good at giving blowjobs? You tell me.

Rupert Grint, by contrast, is being paid to smile in an advert for Sky.

That’s all the Grint they want. Thank you. You can leave now.

He’s not invited to do any acting – God forbid! They just wanted to borrow his head for 3 seconds so they could use it to sell things, like a misshapen orange billboard. The Milk Marketing Board pulled the same trick a couple of years ago, leading to a spate of upchucking women as Grint-besmattered busses trundled by. To this day, the term “Milky Grint” can churn the stomach of the hardiest woman. Show your lady-friends this photo, and slowly whisper “Milky Grint” to them. I bet they shudder and make an expression. I bet they do. In fact, I’m off down to Ladbroke’s now to place that very bet.

Yet despite this, Grint’s net worth in 2012 is £24 million. You’d have to work for a thousand years to get that much money, and who has the time?

I’ll tell you who has the time: Grint has the time. After all, his diary is looking pretty empty. I suspect it always did, even during the Potter years…

Grint’s diary, from the set of “Harry Potter and the Ocelot of Disappointment”:

In truth, it’s a small miracle that any of them grew up to become even a moderate actor: they were between 9 and 11 years old when they began their movie careers, plucked from obscurity because they looked less gap-toothed than most of their contemporaries. Americans are, as we know, more terrified of gap-toothed people than they are of 200 million assault rifles, and the Potter movies would definitely have failed if the lead actors had standard British teeth.

But the kids had good teeth. It’s just the rest of Grint which was substandard. And when they started out they just looked like Cabbage Patch versions of themselves, which must be weird for them to look at now. You think it’s embarrassing when your mum shows your new partner photos of you aged 11? Imagine if you had a whole movie series, and every girl you ever meet thinks she knows exactly who you are, and what you can do with your “wand”. Engorgio!

In retrospect, £24 million seems like reasonable compensation for what fate has done to Grint. He can stop being Weasley, but will always be Grint. He will always be awful and look like he knows it.

Mind you, for the first few movies none of them looked comfortable in their own skin. Who is, at the age of 13? Your skin is your enemy at exactly the moment you most need a friend, and fame and fortune are no protection against the ravages of youth. I watched Romeo + Juliet recently, and Leo’s face seems to be undergoing a meteor shower. I think he spent half his salary on concealer. He looks like he’s been coated in Polyfilla in a few scenes, which I’m sure pleases a lot of blokes who were negatively compared with DiCaprio in their teens. Every generation throws up a pretty boy for the girls to idolise, and all the boys hate whoever it is. Right now it’s Beiber. Before that it was DiCaprio. My own nemesis was George Micheal.

In 1986 boys my age were considered cool and attractive if they wore a cross in one ear, strutted around in white jeans and cowboy boots, displayed several days of beard growth, and had bouffant hair with blonde highlights. Hard to believe people assumed it was the dress sense of a heterosexual man, but that’s what Gorgeous George wore, and he was very definitely a heterosexual man in 1986. He said so in Smash Hits, so it must be true.

My teenaged attempts at looking like George Michael weren’t very successful.

I don’t give a fuck about being fashionable now, as anybody who knows me will definitely confirm. But I can remember how ostracised I felt back then for being unable to grow sufficient stubble or persuade my mum to let me get my ear pierced. I want to seek out Darren Gilmore, my college’s number one George Michael lookalike, show him a photo of Wham! and shout “I told you so” into his unrealistically handsome face. Except by now his face is probably like mine: gradually sliding down his skull like a slow-motion avalanche. I can’t really blame him for being fooled by Wham! I was as fooled as anybody else, I just had my ambitions stymied by my mum and some terrible NHS glasses.

More than quarter of a century later, and my mum is still pissing on my chips. My Christmas will be polite, with only moderate consumption of wine, absolutely no spanking paddles or handcuffs; and then bed before midnight on my second-best lumpy mattress.

Thank you Jesus, you absolute twat!

I thought Pentecost was bad (I received the Gift of the Holy Spirit, but I don’t have the receipt, so can’t take it back and swap it for a cardigan). But Christmas is going to be a wash-out. So Jesus, I’m sorry to break the news, but your parties are always shit and I’m not coming to any more of them. I’ve given up on a rowdy Christmas, and all I can say is: roll on New Year. Because believe me, I’m definitely going to roll on someone at New Year.

We had a deal: she wouldn’t tell you about my invisible pet dinosaur, and I wouldn’t tell you she was born a man.

I guess that deal’s blown out of the water, so anything goes now. Not that I’m upset about her guest blog! I laughed, I wept, I hurled, but most of all I was just impressed that she managed to stick to the English language.

Because speech is a thing that my beloved has trouble with. God knows, she tries. You can’t say she’s not giving it her best effort. She’s a sensitive soul, and I suspect she feels deeply for those poor people who are struck dumb, so she’s doing her utmost to say all the things they want to say. All of them. All of the time. Thankfully she’s got a special way to stop my ears from melting in the onslaught, which is to give me regular “wet willies”, interspersed with loving smacks around the head.

Even performing the wet willy doesn’t silence her. In fact I think her record for being quiet is about as long as it takes her to take a breath, and even sleep isn’t enough to stop her completely. Her nighttime blabbering would keep me awake if it wasn’t for the fact I’m usually already awake because of her mattress fascism.

What, you may ask, is mattress fascism? I’ll tell you. When I first moved out of my parents’ home I got a double bed, thinking that I might lure women into it (I didn’t). But when I eventually did get somebody drunk enough to get in my bed, I realised a double bed isn’t big enough: I’m a stocky fella, and it’s hard to fit a normal-sized woman into my bed with me. So a year or two later I got a king sized, and that seemed to solve the problem. The lucky lady had enough room to sleep off her shame, and I had enough room to sleep off my smugness, and everybody was happy apart from the poor girl who’d just experienced me in the nude.

But the size of bed makes no difference to my little angel, because my little angel is a mattress fascist. She’s determined to invade and take over every inch of the bed, regardless of who it belongs to, and is quite prepared to employ magic to ensure it happens.

Within 30 seconds of lights-out she does something I thought was impossible: she rolls clockwise to wrap herself in the entire duvet, leaving none at all for me; and she simultaneously rolls anticlockwise across the bed, shoving me into a 4-inch wide strip down the edge of the mattress. How can she rotate in both directions at once? Clearly she’s a witch.

Burn the witch!

Her sex face. You can see why I prefer doggy style.

(I could take her into the back garden and burn her with the leaves, although with her skin colour – slightly paler than an albino polo mint – just sending her outside on a sunny day would do the trick, and nobody has to tell the police. Deal?)

So I can look over the body of my beautiful, comely, sweetly-sleeping mattress fascist, and see acres of empty bed, inviting and cool and spacious… and utterly unavailable to me. I’m trapped in the nocturnal equivalent of Gaza, and she’s blockading my sleep. Can’t Kofi Annan do anything about this?

And then the gibbering begins. I’ll be lying there, wide awake, being baked by her hot body (in both senses) squeezing me off the edge of the mattress, and feeling utterly oppressed in my own bed; and she’ll suddenly announce, “motorbike underfelt carnival handbag”, like it’s the beginning of a lecture, and then fart, hit me with her hair, and snore loudly.

I just ignore it now, but the first few times I thought the gibberish meant something. It’s understandable that I would: she’s almost as nonsensical when she’s awake, and half of our time together is taken up by me wrestling with the mangled syntax she hurls at me. (The other half is spent simply wrestling).

You see, she does terrible, terrible things to the English language. Perhaps it’s because she’s a Celt. She was born over here, in leafy, moneyed Cheshire, where she learned to kill foxes, shoot guns and speak in a nice, if highly creative way. But she could barely be more Irish if you found her eating mud in a bog in Donegal with a pig under her arm.

She has that lovely Irish skin too: it’s the colour of the stuff that peels of the bottom of my feet after I’ve spent too long in the bath. And there’s the Irish hair, which responds pretty well to a severe industrial ironing every couple of hours, but left to its own devices manages to look like it was dragged through a hedge and look like the hedge it was dragged through. Clever trick that.

So English might be her mother tongue, but I doubt it’s her grandmother tongue, and in her case her ancestry is taking over her glottis. Throwing caution to the wind, she’s running (with scissors) through the dictionary, cutting-and-pasting as she goes. As a result, she manages to inventerise wordments at every juncticle, like Stanley Unwin after a few too many sherrys, deepjoy.

I may be painting her in a bad light, and I realise this might all sound a bit mean-spirited. But it’s not: she’s actually rather lovely, but in ways that it’s very hard to make any sense of. Examples:

She recently spent half an hour loudly performing whale-song to my scrotum, in the belief it might make it go smooth. It didn’t, I just laughed so much I wet the bed.

She lured me into a long confusing discussion about whether it’s possible to smash two ducks together in a vast underground accelerator, at close to the speed of light, in the hope that the collision will produce a high-energy chaffinch.

She has an odd habit of licking the inside my nostril or, for variety, putting my whole nose in her mouth and blowing until I emit a strangled parp like a tuba being raped. That’s normal, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

Alarmingly, this future primary-school teacher, who is sensitive to the needs and concerns of our nation’s young, responded to my taunt that she was born a man by shouting “Yeah, and my dick’s bigger than yours too” in front of several 8 year olds.

I believe her about her dick, but my tits are bigger than hers, so it’s swings and roundabouts.

Lots of things about her are quite male, actually. She’s got quite a blokey brain, and surprises me with her knowledge of carburetors, her sense of direction, her hairy back, and her charming habit of lifting one cheek and gurning when she farts, which is often. And then she laughs like a drain, and smells like one too.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s a lovely bottom. It’s got the kind of tiny, imperceptible bouncy wobble that makes my mouth dry up and my nether-regions spasm, and she oscillates it beautifully every time she walks away to commit chemical atrocities in my spare bathroom. It wasn’t a spare bathroom until she started using it, but now I dursn’t go in there for any money. I call the hallway leading to that bathroom “Chemical Alley”.

So there’s a permanent “no naked flames” rule near her, in case you ignite something noxious and burn off her… I was going to say “her eyebrows”, but that’s not quite right. “Her unibrow” is a better expression. Because the other thing about her which makes me think she’s a man – specifically Liam Gallagher – is her solitary eyebrow. It’s like Groucho Marx’s moustache has taken residence on her forehead. She’s getting a strimmer for Christmas.

I’m aware that some people who read this blog are my friends, and are probably concerned for my wellbeing at this stage. I’ve just described a possibly mental, definitely violent, crypto-transvestite fascist furball, who is in control of deadly recto-biological weaponry and knows where I sleep (because she’s the border guard). Not only that, she’s half my age, half my size, twice my speed and twice my kidneys; and as a resident of one of the wealthiest towns in Britain she’s got ample experience of shooting peasants and hunting foxes (and ladies, I’m one foxy peasant, ding-dong). So there’s very little chance of me getting away from her if she chooses to attack.

Me, on date night.

But rest easy, friends: she chooses to attack almost hourly, and so far I’ve survived. Even when she’s being loving and gentle, it somehow often leads to a painful knee to the dangleberries, a bite on the face, a blizzard of tickling and being flicked on the head, or a thorough test of whether it hurts more to be punched in the kidney or in the place where my other kidney used to be. I put it down to her having an enquiring mind, and a penchant for bloodthirsty experimentation.

Example: during a recent motorway trip, she decided to show her affection by squeezing my head as I drove, and in doing so managed to shove her thumb under my eyelid, leaving me blind at 70mph in heavy traffic. This is normal for us. This is every day.

Any trip with her in a car is a risky enterprise, because when she’s not blinding me she subjects me to a torrent of pokes, kicks, tickles, bites to the shoulder and head, and drooling tongues shoved in my ear. Not in a sexual way either: just to annoy me.

So I’m wondering if we’re in love, or in a war. It could be either, but it’s probably both. I’m only telling you this stuff in case I’m found dead one morning: the chances are, it was an accident, but no coroner would come to that conclusion if they found me battered and blinded, with my head covered in bites, freezing in my own bed, and possibly with a thing inserted in my bum and abusive notes left on my bedside table. For the record: all of that is perfectly normal and above-board.

Consider this a legal statement, because when she reads this I suspect I’ll need one.

Spoiler. If you haven’t seen The Dark Knight Rises, don’t read any further.

I’ve broken my spine. It’s actually broken.

Careful: this kindly old man is going to punch you in your shattered spine.

OK, maybe a bit of an exaggeration: I’ve actually got a touch of sciatica, and it just hurts when I move. I wasn’t slammed over Tom Hardy’s knee like Batman was, and unfortunately I don’t have a dishevelled Tom Conti here to dangle me from a rope and lovingly punch my spine back together.

I never went to medical school, so I’ll take Christopher Nolan’s word for it that this is the correct way to fix a broken back.

Actually I’ve got it worse than Batman, because even though he’s got no cartilage he has, as far as we know, both of his kidneys. So he’s allowed to take Ibuprofen, but I’m not. Sciatica with no anti inflammatory painkillers: it’s a pain, quite literally. I’m not even allowed whiskey, which was my painkiller of choice in the good old days, when I still had a full set of internal organs and a rock hard liver. Ahhh, Glenfiddich, how I miss you. You saw me through the worst of times. You usually caused the worst of times too, but we’ll let that pass.

Anyway, that’s why I’ve been silent for a while: back-ache. I normally just need a subject matter that annoys me, such as Simon Cowell. Just writing his name annoys me. I once knew a Bassett Hound call Simon, and I thought he was lovely. But now the fact that the dog had 50% of Simon Cowell’s name just makes me angry at it, and I want to kick the beast in its saggy, drooly, soppy face.

Cowell infuriates me that much. I should write a blog about it. Oh, hold on, I’ve written about 900 of them.

Anyway, normally I just need the seed of an idea, or something to rant about, and then I can sit at my desk churning out these blogs with nary a care in the world, interrupted only by my body’s demand for coffee and the ever-present allure of porn.

A wanker in 1764

Isn’t it weird that the thing we use to be productive is also the thing we use to sag off work and wank ourselves into a husk? I have a mental image of a sun-dappled meadow in the middle ages, with a hoary son of the soil sucking on a piece of hay as he gently leads his plough up and down the field, cultivating the land and planting seed – and then looking furtively around, dropping his trousers, and having a speed-wank while trying to ignore the back-end of his horses.

Never happened. There’s nothing sexy about ploughing a field, and abslutely nothing sexy about a horse’s arse. If you disagree with my last statement, seek help. But where once we separated work from fun, now they’re blending into one, like the TV, phone and computer and inhexorably merging into a single device. Soon we’ll be watching telly, shopping, working and wanking all at the same time, constantly, through one piece of equipment, 24 hours a day.

This generation is doomed, and it’s all the fault of Sir Tim Berner’s-Lee. What was he thinking? Cunt.

But even without the lure of porn, it’s hard to write blogs (or drink coffee, or spank one out) when you’re flat-out on the sofa, groaning slightly and comfort-eating a hundredweight of Hobnobs.

So I’ve been ignoring my blog for a few days, but this morning I got an email notification telling me that some damn fool has decided to follow me – I should be saying thank you, shouldn’t I? – and when I logged in to find out who the nincompoop is, I noticed some new search terms.

In case you didn’t know, WordPress tells me what search terms people have used to find my blog. I’ve had some doozies, my favourite being “huge hard morning wood throbbing photo”, which is just so specific. That man or woman… let’s face it, it’s a man… has no interest in huge hard penises at any other time of the day: just in the morning. Brilliant.

But today’s selection takes the biscuit. Here is the full list of terms people searched for when they found this blog during the last 24 hours:

my naked girlfriend

can you paper mache naked skin

naked mole rat it’s fucked basically

libido fetish

lost my cherry to the black taxi driver

In my mind, it’s one person who wants to find them all. He has a girlfriend, but she won’t turn the lights on during sex, so he’s never seen her naked. Therefore he wants to make a papier-mache cast of her body, but needs to know if it’s possible. Papier mache being what it is, it’ll probably come out looking as wrinkly as a naked mole rat, but he’s going to fuck it anyway; and why? Because he has a libido and likes fetishes. Don’t blame him: he’s been that way ever since he lost his cherry to that black taxi driver.

My only question is: was the driver black, or the taxi? I’m genuinely intriged, and if that person was you, I want to know more. But in the meantime, I’m going to spend an hour trying to put my socks on, which is tricky enough with a bit of sciatica. It makes you wonder how the hell they managed to get Batman out of his rubber costume and half way around the world with a broken back?

It doesn’t matter how certain you are of your identity, if you ask Google you’ll discover you’re actually somebody else entirely. For example, I was fairly sure I was me until recently, but it turns out I’m actually a violent, gold-toothed, crack-addicted, black rapper known to his friends as Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Oh, and I’m dead. Bummer!

Perhaps I really am that dead rapper, but I think it’s more likely that Google is mistaken, and I’m still me, and as likely to rap as Prince Phillip is. All of which proves Google can’t be trusted: just look at the ways it’s directed people to these pages.

WordPress shows me statistics about this blog, which is why I know I sometimes get as many as 7 people reading this tender outpouring of my aching soul. It rises to 9 if I mention sex, but I’m not prepared to whore myself for you, you dirty-minded bunch of scoundrels.

(No, it’s fine, don’t feel any pressure to retweet or like me on Facebook, I’ll survive on those few paltry views).

I digress! Amongst the WordPress statistics is a list of the search terms used to find my blog. It’s sobering reading…

fully naked simon cowell
There’s no need for that. Stop. Just… stop. I briefly wondered what sort of mental frailty would make a person want to see a fully naked Cowell. And why the inclusion of the word “fully”? Had they previouly searched for plain old “naked Simon Cowell”, and been disappointed to find he was wearing a glove? And then I saw that 19 identially mental people had found my blog with this search, which qualifies as a spree, or maybe an outbreak. I don’t want to encourage genocide, but if anyone has a vial of Smallpox, now would be a perfect time…

Craig the dirty naked moleratAll of those words are perfectly valid, but when you put them into that order it takes some explaining. It’s just so specific. Not just any dirty naked molerat: it has to be Craig. He’s the best of the many, many dirty naked molerats in the world.

mole thrashing behaviourIs this a request for information about the most appropriate behaviour when one is going on a mole-thrashing expedition? Or is it that there are thrash-metal moles listening to Anthrax in some poor bugger’s back garden, and he wants to know how to curtail this behaviour? And, more importantly, what results did this person actually find? Because when you search for “mole thashing behaviour” the only matching results are a tweet from me about it. He must have been so disappointed.

huge hard morning wood throbbing photoI can understand wanting to see photos of huge throbbing body parts, but why does it have to be taken in the morning? Is the person behind this search really disinterested by erections that happen after midday? I demand answers.

Mick Hucknall nakedThese words, in this exact combination, make an excellent emetic. No more slipping fingers down your throat and groping for your sick-trigger on those ghastly, hung-over mornings: just repeat “Mick Hucknall naked” twice, and you’re sure to vomit lavishly all over the cat. But be careful: say it three times and he appears in person, like a ginger, plastic-soul Beetlejuice, and you have to beat him to death with hammers.

women’s titsNot men’s tits. Careful! What we’re looking for here is specifically women’s tits. If you’re after men’s tits, please allow me to refer you to the search for a naked Simon Cowell.

I’m delighted to discover Katy Red has found true happiness, even if it does seem to have only lasted about half the time it takes to write a blog about it.

I don’t know if happiness makes for great reading. No, scratch that: I know it doesn’t. It’s one of the reasons literally everybody in the known universe wants to stab Matthew McConaughey in the face. He’s unfeasibly pleased with his life, and it makes me want to end it for him. I ache for him to become famous for a terrible-yet-hilarious accident involving an industrial threshing machine and a loose shoelace, which results in him missing a foot. In fact, I’m investing in a company which delivers poorly maintained threshing machines to Hollywood stars right now. It’s the type of thing that should be encouraged.

Did you know that if you take some of the letters away, replace them with others, and rearrange them a bit, Matthew McConaughey is an anagram of “smug bastard”?

Even when I’m happy, I try hard not to let it spill over into my online life, because there’s little that’s more depressing that hearing how bloody wonderful somebody else feels.

Won the lottery? Fantastic news, now share half the winnings or shut your flap. Or better still, share half the winnings and shut your flap.

Got a great relationship? That’s wonderful news, now ask yourself why nobody ever made a great movie about people who are ecstatically happy all the time. And while you’re asking that, shut your flap.

Just found a new job? OK, I’ll let you have that one. Jobs are pretty thin on the ground, and if you’ve got one and it makes you happy, I’ll let you shout about it without judging you. But it won’t last. In 6 weeks you’ll hate it, and that’s when I’ll be more interested. Tweet that you’ve got a job. Briefly tell us how happy you are. But don’t you dare to blog about it until you loathe your boss and believe you’d be happier working as the guy who combs the crusty bits out of the fur around Michael Winner’s hairy ringpiece.

Yes, I just put that image in your mind. That’s how much I hate your happiness.

I had a recent unfortunate slip. I accidentally let people know I was pretty happy. I still am, and long may it continue, but I promise you this is my last reference to it. You don’t care, and I don’t share. So back to moaning about life.

Katy lists the things that make for a happy life. Here’s the list:

Be healthy. Yeah, cheers. 40 years of boxing, rugby, little drinking and no smoking, and bingo: cancer. How are we meant to “be healthy” when the world is full of shit, delivered at random?

Live with a partner who loves and respects you. Genius. Why didn’t we think of that? I’ll just pop down to the Post Office and pick mine up, they’re 10 a penny.

Have a child. Tricky if you don’t have a partner, even trickier if nobody will have sex with you because you look like a strategically shaved baboon. I’ve tried stealing an urchin from the park, but their parents get so ruffled by it. Apparently their happiness trumps mine. Some people are so fucking selfish.

Get a cat/dog. Next door’s cat moved in. He regularly attacks my extremities. He wakes me at 5am to eat tuna, and 10 minutes later regurgitates it in a warm, watery pile on my duvet, then glares balefully at me because he hates the sound of me washing my bedding. I’m not sure either of us is happy with the relationship.

Spend less than you earn. I’ll just have a word with George Osborne about this, I’m sure he’ll help by instantly solving the global economic crisis.

Don’t use your credit card to pay for your expenditure on a monthly basis. This one has become easier since my bank insisted we go back to the old arrangement, where I paid my bills now and again. Credit cards are a thing of the past, like dignity.

Don’t borrow. Presumably meaning don’t get a mortgage, or a car, or start a business. In fact, for maximum happiness, live in your mum’s basement forever.

Don’t lend money. I won’t lend unicorns either, which are just as prevalent in my life right now.

Don’t gamble. Are you kidding me? My entire future planning consists of hoping for a lottery win. So does yours. Go on, admit it! If I’m wrong, and you actually have savings and a pension and an ISA, then you’re a bastard and probably responsible for the parlous economic state we’re in now. I’m sure you’ll be happy while you stride over the bodies of the rest of us sprawling destitute on the streets.

Surround yourself with pleasant smells. I have anosmia, which is the nasal equivalent of blindness. It’s caused by being punched, and reading this is bound to make you appreciate why punching has been a factor in my life. I can’t smell flowers, or fruits, or perfumes. But I can smell bullshit, which brings me to…

Keep a gratitude journal. I’m grateful to the education system, and public transport, and the environment, and investment in our national infrastructure, and the welfare state, and the NHS… what’s that? Oh, they’ve all gone. Cheers.

Make arrangements to donate your organs on your death. I’m one step ahead of you: one of mine is gone already.

You know how it is: it gets past July, and the shops start filling with mince pies and gooey puddings. Where once the supermarket stocked organic asparagus, now they stock 400 varieties of advocaat so you can snowball your brain into a highly flammable soufflé.

You go into a shop – or, God help you, work in a shop – and the permanent soundtrack becomes one of enforced jollity and tinkly sleigh-bells.

Like an old dinghy, Cliff is taken from his normal abode at the back of the cupboard under the stairs, dusted off, inflated as much as his undoubtedly gaping hole will allow (never inflated enough to smooth out the billion wrinkles) and shoved outside to be played with by people who don’t know what real fun is.

And after a few months, it dawns on you that soon it will be 25th of December again, and time for the universe to stop so we can all listen to Auntie Marjorie tell us what’s wrong with “the blacks”. (Maybe you don’t have an Auntie Marjorie, in which case you’re lucky. She’s the kind of woman who makes you want to climb a tree, then pull it up after you.)

For a kick-off, it’s the right size for Britain. We don’t like a fuss. Christmas is a fuss. It’s American in scale, and the only people who truly enjoy it are young kids, people who have young kids, and people who desperately yearn to still be young kids. Whereas Easter just ambles into your life without a lot of hoo-ha, has a couple of drinks, gooses you pleasantly, and leaves before it gets annoying. Perfect.

And it always seems to be a surprise guest too. Just like the best evenings out are the unplanned ones, so Easter is better than Christmas. Christmas is like one of those “let’s go to Dublin, all 17 of us, it’ll be great” parties, which ends up being too desperate and organised, like orienteering with a bladder complaint. Easter, however, is like going for a quick drink after work and ending up eating magic mushrooms off a Turkish prostitute at 4am. You never saw it coming, but my God it’s welcome.

You see, its impossible to work out when Easter happens. Figuring out the correct date for Easter is like nailing custard to a wall. I see the eggs in shops, but not even Tesco has the kind of budget required to produce in-store displays for all the possible dates Easter can fall on. So instead I rely on colleagues to tell me when its here.

And who tells them? Their kids. And who tells the kids? Teachers.

(I have no idea how teachers know this stuff. I’ve recently come to the conclusion that teachers are magic.)

But it’s not just the meandering chronology of Easter that I like: it’s the fact that I have no clue which of the 4 days is an actual “thing”. Friday? Sunday? Both? Maybe the Monday – or is that just a holiday because we’re all meant to get hammered on Sunday? Is that in the bible – thou shalt drink a KFC Bargain Bucket full of gin to celebrate Our Lord crawling out of a cave? Who knows. And it’s too late for me to find out; I’ve slipped off the learning curve, and all that gin and chicken-fat has addled my mind.

Which brings me to the traditional Easter food: chocolate eggs and rabbits.

Think about that: eggs and rabbits. You’re all bright people, so I’m sure I don’t need to point out the pagan symbolism of mating and birth that is contained in the rabbits and eggs iconography. It’s spring-festival, captured, colonised and castrated by dull old Christianity. Just like the feast of Bacchus, or as we know it today, Christmas. Pagans knew how to have fun: get pissed at Christmas, and get laid at Easter. But instead we give our children the symbols of sexual adventure, which are, as you’d expect from Christianity, expensive, hidden, wrapped in shiny paper, and hollow.

Personally, I don’t like chocolate, which might be the only minor problem I have with Easter, and it doesn’t stop me from buying eggs for my nephews. I loved chocolate when I was a kid, and have the fillings to prove it. But if you stop eating it for about 4-6 weeks, you lose the taste for it forever. It’s surprisingly bitter. Sure, it seems sweet, but that’s just the insane doses of sugar they put in it to hide the real taste. Say goodbye to your pancreas, chocoholics!

But my favourite thing about Easter is that it’s a perfect break from work. Four days is spot on. Not enough time to get bored, and two whole weekends, back to back. There’s often a good thing on telly, and even if there isn’t, there are bracing hills to climb, happy days at the zoo, or other splendid adventures.

And even when its over, I know that soon it’ll be May Bank Holiday too. But don’t ask me how soon: only teachers know that stuff.

And finally: it’s one year today since I got diagnosed with cancer. And I’m fine. I don’t believe in any of that Zombie Jesus mumbo-jumbo. I’m not reborn. The only miracle was the NHS, so praise be to socialism!

So for once, this blog is devoid of my usually snarky cynicism. No piss and vinegar. I like Easter. But don’t worry, I’ll get better: it’ll soon be Christmas again!